


From Water Risen

by RookHill



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Arthur Pendragon (Merlin)-centric, Arthur Pendragon Returns, Ficlet, Gen, Immortal Merlin, M/M, Once and Future King, Romance, Waiting for Arthur Pendragon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-10-06 10:09:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17343371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RookHill/pseuds/RookHill
Summary: "Arthur wasn’t certain of anything these days. Not anything but the coldness of the lake."





	From Water Risen

Arthur wasn’t certain of anything these days. Not anything but the coldness of the lake. If he focused very hard, he could drag his fingers through the black silt, watch the fine grains cloud the water, then settle back along the murky floor. He couldn’t quite remember how he got here – every time he drew close to snagging the end of knowing, an icy current numbed it to stillness and carried it away. Years seemed to go by, ages, with nothing to cut through the shadows but the silver scales of fish flashing in the dark, and sometimes the gleam of Freya’s watchful eyes.

Freya remembered. Freya remembered everything, and her memories flowed from her mouth in loud and trembling songs that echoed through the wide lake and made the waving weeds bow beneath her solemn dirge. Sometimes when Arthur grew so cold he forgot even himself, Freya sang for him, combing her fingers through his hair as though to coax his mind to stir beneath her gentle hands. She sang of a golden king, loved and betrayed in equal turns. She sang of a servant queen who bowed at the bank of Avalon to send her silent tears down to the deep. She sang of a people made strong by their stolen sovereign. And she sang of a sorcerer, a man who plucked the strings of fate. Whose magic thrummed through all their stories, the music of all their lives. 

Once or twice there were other voices too. Spirits like him, pressing their words against the thin film between their plane and Arthur’s. The swirl of sand over stones became a whisper, then a cry. A woman called to him, pleaded for Arthur to come away. Away into another world.

“I can’t, Guinevere,” he said, with a certainty he didn’t understand. “I’m waiting.”

“What are you waiting for?” she asked.

But Arthur couldn’t remember.

Then, once, he heard a man, his voice rumbling like a roiling sea.

“That sorcerer!” the man cried. “How could you befriend such a creature? You’re not my son!”

Arthur shrank from the voice, sinking down into the centre of the lake where no sound could reach, not even Freya’s haunting songs. And there the ghost lay for a long, long time, while the world came and went around him. While the lake froze in winter, while it melted in spring. While the stars zigzagged across the vast sky he could not see. And then one night they all convened as eager watchers above the land that was once called Camelot. A golden light sliced through the Lake of Avalon, illuminating every sunken branch, every broken mast, each muddy skull, and Arthur felt himself wrenched into the open air. He breathed in for the first time in over one thousand years. 

“Arthur! Arthur!”

Who was Arthur? 

But what did it matter, when he was wrapped up in dragon fire? The man was burning, his newfound shell of blood and bones too much to bare. There were fingers like hooks on his shoulders too, piercing his flesh in their passion, holding him down. Arthur thrashed his head side to side, though his eyes could see nothing, not even the flame that clung to his soul. All was grey. He retched at the feel of night air reaching deep inside him, belching putrid water over moon-white flesh.

“Oh gods, Arthur!”

Arms wound around him now, clutching fast, as though he might slip from his body and back into the lake. Arthur couldn’t say who was gasping, himself or the stranger, and he didn’t have time to find out. All at once, the fire fell away and his skull struck the splintered wood beneath him. Arthur went limp in the bottom of the rowboat. 

It was many minutes before he floated to the surface of his fitful dream. When Arthur at last found consciousness, it was only to trade one nightmare for another. He felt the scratching blanket on his livid skin and the shaking in his chair before he recognized the light against his lids – the promise of sight. The king pried his eyes open, and was instantly ambushed by the rush of the world. He was hurtling down a black road. Cold, towering torches lined the path and tore towards him, then vanished. The blue-black silhouettes of trees crashed forward and away, phantom giants in the night. Arthur felt bile rise in his throat, or perhaps it was only scum from the lake. He jerked his face away, and that’s when he saw the stranger. 

An old man was sitting close beside. The periodic light of the torches burst over his sharp cheeks and deep-set eyes in a frantic rhythm, and his knobby knuckles bulged against the wheel in his fists. White scraggles of hair poured from his hat and around his lips, which were flecked with sand and sweat. There was something in the fretful crease of his brow, in the downturned corner of his mouth, that called out to Arthur.

“You,” he croaked, the word like a shard of broken glass as he dragged it up his throat.

The old man’s head whipped around. His wide eyes were blue and burning. Like molten metal streaming through the cracks of a mould, the light therein travelled through the deep lines of his skin to illuminate the whole of his face with a familiar, joyous hope.

“Yes,” he croaked back, and Arthur could have sworn he knew that voice. “Yes, it’s me.”

But before Arthur knew it, he was sliding over the armrest and into another sleep. 

When he awoke a second time, it was a far gentler thing. 

Arthur opened his eyes slowly, warily. At first all he could make out was a yellow blur, but it coalesced into a small room coloured by the morning sun, shining from an unseen window. Sparks still lingered on his skin, but it wasn’t the inferno of before. Arthur took a deep breath. His lungs creaked outwards, unused to their old tempo, and relished in the soft sweetness of the air.

‘Chamomile,’ he thought, even as he wondered how he knew the flower’s name. Sure enough, dried plants bundled in twine were hanging from the ceiling at the foot of the bed on which he lay. The scent transformed into the feel of a clay cup against his infant lips and the warmth of a wrinkled hand against his fevered brow. Arthur narrowed his eyes at the flowers in concentration, hanging on the edge of a perfumed recollection. There was something in their withered petals. Something from far away.

‘Drink this, Arthur,’ said a kindly physician in his thoughts. The hand pressed a cool cloth to his head. ‘It will help you sleep through the fever.’ 

Though his endless days beneath the waves had been something like a curse, surely it was a curse mixed with a blessing. A frozen heart cannot hurt, and a body plucked of skin and sinew by passing fish cannot feel pain. Arthur suddenly felt the weight of his limbs like stones, pulling him into the mattress. He felt the weight of the very air as he dragged it inside himself, fuel for a hearth he’d never meant to set alight. For a moment, Arthur thought it would be good to sleep again. He blinked slowly. Once, twice. He’d only shut his eyes a moment when a warning screamed through his body, like the clear song of a sword striking stone.

‘I can’t sleep anymore!’ Arthur thought in defiance. He shook away the old man’s voice and the taste of tea. ‘I’ve slept for far too long already, and this fever is passing. I’m waiting for someone. That’s right, there’s someone I’m waiting for!’

He unstuck his gaze from the flowers. Despite the ache in his neck, Arthur turned his head and looked down to the edge of the mattress, where he discovered a second sleeper. The same steely jolt from before resounded through his heart, for he knew the man slumped in the chair at his bedside. The sleeper’s dark hair was copper where it caught the morning light, and his lashes were long on his high cheekbones. Arthur’s eyes traced the contour of his nose to the curve of his mouth in a fluid, knowing sweep, like gliding his thumb around the edge of a map he’d read a thousand times before. The man’s brows were knit in worry, his lips parted around words caught in the channel between dream and the waking world. 

No sooner had Arthur’s eyes alighted on the man than they were compelled downwards. With regret and surprise, they shifted to the sword between their bodies. There it lay atop the tangled quilt at Arthur’s side, just within hand’s reach. Its blade was dark and dull, blunt and jagged along both sides. Though it was only metal, it seemed like the brittle husk of something that had once lived. It looked dead and defeated, but Arthur knew better. Somewhere deep inside himself, he knew. With an anticipation he couldn’t quite account for, the king slid his fingers along the covers to grasp its hilt. It was heavy in his hand. Perfectly heavy, perfectly right. Arthur grasped it fiercely and dug his thumb through its thick cake of mud to get at its latticed core. It was cold to the touch.

Suddenly, the sword came alive. 

A golden glow burst from Arthur’s palm to race across the blade. His eyes widened in amazement as it travelled from hilt to point, stripping away the years and the countless layers of grime, until at last Excalibur lay gleaming and new and sharp against the patchwork. Like Arthur, it was born again. The sword flashed silver in the light of the new sun, like scales in a dark lake, like Freya’s watchful eyes, and cut to the very heart of the king. 

And Arthur remembered.

He remembered Camelot’s towers, the Pendragon standard flying high and red in a cloudy summer sky. He remembered his promises, made and broken. Remembered the loves he kindled, lost, re-won, destroyed. Battlefields, guts strewn over grass. Scraping his knee on the rough bark of an apple tree as he climbed higher, higher. Burying his father. Marrying his wife. Cold steel through his stomach. He remembered Guinevere, Gaius, Mordred, Morgana, and all his knights at Camelot. And he remembered the man whose magic thrummed through all their stories. The music of all their lives. 

“How could I forget?”

Arthur sat up and looked at Merlin, and Merlin was looking back. He’d woken at the flare of magic. His eyes shimmered golden for a moment before flowing back to blue, as they’d always been all that time ago. In another life, Arthur might have cuffed the man for the tenderness in his expression, for the hungry, hopeful way he reached for his hand, then drew back at the last moment, unsure. As it was, Arthur couldn’t so much as roll his eyes. He swallowed the lump in his throat and reached out in turn, winding his fingers with his friend’s. 

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Merlin said, very quiet, as hot tears anointed their knotted hands. 

Arthur smiled.

“And I you.”

**Author's Note:**

> "Merlin" is a creation of Julian Jones, Jake Michie, Julian Murphy, and Johnny Capps. I claim no rights to the original content. This story was not written for profit, but for my own amusement (and perhaps even yours).


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